Sarah Grey's essay Salvaging the Dormant: On Language (http://salvage.zone/in-print/salvaging-the-dormant-on-language/) : 'Declaring a language 'dead' is a tricky business. The death of a language is not like the death of a human being. It's true that there is a certain permanence to it. When the last native speaker dies – and then the last fluent speaker, then the last of those who remember bits and pieces – something has slipped away forever. If, however, the language has left a trace, a footprint clear enough to measure and cast, there is still some possibility of salvage.' Read the full essay here (http://salvage.zone/in-print/salvaging-the-dormant-on-language/) . —

Andrea Gibbons' A Place to Call Home (http://salvage.zone/in-print/a-place-to-call-home/) : 'Grenfell represents what Rob Nixon calls spectacular violence, a flaming inferno brought about by this worldview with its austerity, deregulation and crisis. But it is founded on the violence of day-to-day neglect of the social infrastructure that belongs to us, a heritage of earlier struggle. The violence of disrespect and utter disregard for life shown to the residents of social housing.' Read the full essay here (http://salvage.zone/in-print/a-place-to-call-home/) . —

James Gurrey's Guilt and the Left (http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/guilt-and-the-left/) : 'The tabloid press and reality television gorge on the 'feckless depravity' of the poor, the police treat vast sectors of the population as criminal, and we have entire government departments, in the Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions, whose purpose, it seems, is to make distressed people feel bad about themselves. It might be at work that people are exposed to the most amount of guilt, and the lower down the scale of authority (which is in part to say the lower your social class) the more guilt is heaped upon you.' Read the full essay here (http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/guilt-and-the-left/) . —

Salvage operates on a shoestring, and relies almost entirely on volunteer labour. For that reason, we shamelessly invite, and are deeply grateful for, any donations (http://salvage.zone/donate/) . All will be ploughed in to our work, and our project: to produce an indispensable quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters; to examine the successes, and manifold failures, of our movement; to keep questioning; and ultimately, we hope, to help rebuild in the political rubble around us, to be part of a habitable Left.

Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing 4 times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the 'Merciless criticism of everything that exists': for us that includes Marxism itself.